Jody Lynn Nye

Reading Myth-Gotten Gains, one of the later books Robert Asprin wrote with Jody Lynn Nye, I wondered what Terry Pratchett thought of him. We know that Asprin died while reading a Pratchett novel in 2008. As far as I know, they never got together to share a pun or two. Asprin started publishing a few years before Pratchett but had a fallow period in the nineties when Pratchett was reaching his stride. Their fictional worlds share the idea that our muggle dimension bleeds over into the livelier realms of fantasy. Both had fun with interdimensional puns. Discworld had a fad called Music with Rocks In. Asprin gives you a groaner from an old TV ad. When the Shaor Ming nuns tell Aahz that their good works and prayers exempted them from taxes and fees, Aahz quips, “So nobody is supposed to squeeze the Shaor Ming?” The nuns, of course, don’t get it. Pratchett’s humor has depths that Asprin seldom reaches, but as a Catskill comic might say, funny is funny. So enjoy.… (mais)

I wanted to like this book so much more than I did - it's a real disappointment. Focussing on mothers as a theme for a science fiction collection should have produced some really interesting stories. Unfortunately this, it seems, is not a collection of previously-published stories but a commissioned anthology where someone decides on a theme and asks writers to produce stories around it.

Most of the writers (including many who I know are capable of much better) have taken a stereotypical or hackneyed view of the theme. The mothers here are sitcom characters, or mothers viewed through a simplistic child's lens - scolding mothers, ambitious mothers, caring mothers - but all of them are cardboard characters (as are most of the others.) The science fiction setting is often pointless or incidental and as such I think very few of these stories qualify as science fiction by the usual definitions. (And some are firmly in the genre of fantasy rather than SF.)

A handful of stories rise above this to the level of average but there is little or nothing to recommend this book.… (mais)